by Daniel Akst

In the era of the Internet, will we still go to libraries to borrow books and do research? The answer seems to be a resounding yes, because libraries are more than just a place to keep volumes on dusty shelves.

Libraries are supposed to be quiet, but it’s hard to imagine a place causing more noise than the new central branch of the Seattle Public Library, which sits with its off-kilter geometry and brightly colored interiors at the heart of a city mainly associated with digital technology.

“In more than 30 years of writing about architecture,” Herbert Muschamp enthused in The New York Times, “this is the most exciting new building it has been my honour to review.” He described the Rem Koolhaas design as a “blazing chandelier to swing your dreams upon.”

Time Magazine put the building atop its list of best architecture in 2004. Visitors thronged the place from the day it opened, some of them flying to Seattle just to check out the building much as people fly to Bilbao to visit Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum. Seattle’s up-to-date Central Library seems to embody everything new.

But since libraries are society’s memory, the history of this particular library is worth noting. Construction of the original Seattle Central Library began in 1905, after a fire destroyed its itinerant predecessor and library advocates made a plea for funds to a steel tycoon on the other side of the country. Andrew Carnegie had already launched his campaign to fund public libraries all over the English-speaking world, and in a matter of days had agreed to provide $200,000 for a new building (and, later, $20,000 for furnishings). The resulting burly masonry pile, completed the following year, was too small inside of a generation.

In 1960 it was replaced by a larger International Style structure—one that was also, in about a generation, outgrown. Eventually this too was demolished, and with substantial help from Microsoft billionaires Bill Gates and Paul Allen—Andrew Carnegie’s modern-day counterparts—the new facility was constructed.

The question now is whether this futuristic structure is outdated already—whether, in fact, it was outdated even while it was on the drawing board. Thanks in part to companies like Microsoft, most people have computers and most of those computers are connected. Roughly 80 percent of Americans have Internet access at home, work or school. High-speed wireless Internet connectivity is spreading rapidly, and lightweight tablet computers have begun to appear.

In December 2004, moreover, just months after the new Seattle library opened its doors, the Internet search company Google announced an agreement with Harvard, Stanford and Oxford universities, the University of Michigan, and The New York Public Library to digitize millions of volumes from their shelves and make the contents searchable to all for free via the Internet*. Google will pay for the scanning and the libraries will get digital copies of their materials. The rest of us—well, the rest of us get something resembling one of the world’s great research libraries right in our living rooms.

“Within two decades,” says Michael A. Keller, Stanford University’s head librarian, “most of the world’s knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today.”

Can that really be possible? If so, where exactly does it leave libraries? More important, where does it leave culture? On the one hand, the digital revolution represents the ultimate democratization of knowledge and information, of which Carnegie likely would have approved wholeheartedly. On the other hand, libraries perform an essential function in preserving, organizing and to some extent validating our collective knowledge. They are traditionally seen as a pillar of democracy. And they provide a place to go—the crucial “third place,” other than home and work or school (and as early library advocates liked to point out, other than the saloon as well). Unlike Starbucks, you don’t have to buy anything, and the wares are as intoxicating in their way as any at a neighborhood bar—except they don’t impair driving.

Nobody can reliably predict the far-off future, but for libraries, the digital information revolution raises a host of existential questions about the present. In this day of Amazon, the Internet, hundreds of cable channels and ubiquitous computing, what is the role of the institutions Andrew Carnegie thought were so important that he devoted himself and a good bit of his fortune to propagating them?

*To a large extent, only the full text of only those materials that are in the public domain or out-of-print will be available.

Next page: Carnegie’s goal was one shared by many thinking people today: to empower working people to improve their lot, as he had improved his by using the personal library of Colonel Joseph Anderson of Allegheny City, Pennsylvania.

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